Only a Man
"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."
-C. S. Lewis
I still can't say his name without breaking up.
I have a hard time getting my mind around the fact that he's dead. It just doesn't seem real. He was the closest thing I've ever met to Superman and I keep expecting him to walk through the door asking if there's anything for tea. This time, I think, he's not joking. He's buried, but I haven't been able to bury him in my mind.
He used all of us. It was his way or the highway. He'd hack into my phone or my laptop because he didn't want to walk across the room to get his own. I was angry, because I wanted to find something there I could respect. I wanted him to play the man. I had to get my mind around the fact that he wasn't a man; he was a child in a man's body.
He'd ask me to do things for him all the time; sometimes it would be for a case, sometimes it wouldn't. I could never tell which it was until afterwards. When he knew I wouldn't agree, he'd drop me into it anyway and watch me dance. He used me as bait to lure the villains in, he used me as a scientific experiment, a lab rat. I often wondered if he enjoyed it.
Part of me tried to absolve him. He didn't know what it was like to be somebody else. He was himself, he couldn't fathom what it was like to be me. He couldn't feel what I was feeling. Sometimes I would wonder if it was possible to be someone like him, to be a highly functioning machine and nothing else.
He said he didn't have friends. He had a brother, but Mycroft also doubled as his arch enemy. I wasn't sure what I was. As the years went by, he had plenty of money to pay the rent, he didn't need to split with me, but that never seemed to occur to him. He didn't like change.
I liked to think of myself as normal. I'm an army surgeon who served in Afghanistan. I've seen unspeakable horrors. I'm short. I haven't got a face to draw the ladies. Someone once told me I looked like something that sprang from the Shire in Middle Earth. I'm too normal. Too mundane. I don't have friends either. I liked to think I did, but I didn't. I couldn't even use a great mind as my excuse. They all demanded something from me and when I couldn't give it, they left. There was only one person who stuck by me through thick and thin. That was him. Our friendship was unconditional. He used me, but I think that if I had refused to be used it wouldn't have changed anything. As angry as he made me, he was still my comrade. The only one I had.
I often wanted to punch his face, but it wasn't because of his mind games, his manipulations, his selfishness. It was because I wanted to see something in him. I wanted to see a man behind the mask. He was a great man, but I wanted him to be a good one too; I wanted to see a spark of soul. It was because he was my friend that he made me so angry. If he wasn't, I wouldn't have cared.
He was real. I believe that with all my heart. He was more real than anyone I've ever met. There was nothing fake about his genius…there was nothing fake about his flaws either, but I will never forgive that psychic that drove him to his death. I don't know what was said on that roof, but if Jim hadn't acted the coward and killed himself, I would have done it for him. I guess it wouldn't have mattered in the long run; my friend is still dead.
I wish he would have let me talk to him before the end, try to make him see that it didn't matter what other people said. Now he's dead and I can't help thinking that if he'd lived a little longer he might have shown me the man I wanted to see. A man who was willing to give himself for his friends. A man who cared. But, it's too late now. I'll never know.
He had a book of Shakespeare on his shelf, Hamlet. I'm not kidding. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?